The Who and the Why

When I was seventeen an event happened that would change my life forever, my grandmother died. My grandmother had raised me since birth due to my parents deaths soon after I was born in a car crash. My grandmother told me that god had kept me alive until the paramedics got there. Yeah, that’s nice I thought at the time, god’s looking out for me. I liked the sound of it, while most people have a guardian angel who would protect them, I had a whole god to save me from death. This comforted me, and to a five-year-old mind, it made perfect sense. So it was this that I remembered when my grandmother died.
At first all I could feel was anger, why would god let my grandmother die? Why would He take the only thing I had ever had to hold onto away from me now, when I was just beginning to understand? Soon I came to the conclusion that there was no god. I was angry, frustrated with being lied to, and most of all; alone. That is one thing that I cannot stand, to be alone.
If you talked to any of my friends at that time they would have told you that I was the happy, friendly sort who joked often and was never seen without a smile. After the death of my grandmother, I decided that it was useless to pretend that I was happy. I lived, only briefly, with my aunt. I am most grateful for that being a brief stay. My aunt was a kindly woman, mid-thirties, who thought that I was perpetually four-years-old. She was the kind of stereotypical aunt who pinches your cheeks at family reunions. The reason that my stay with her was so short was that I killed her.
Oh, and her husband. Yes, her husband, my uncle, he was a good man whom I had a lot of respect for. He treated my aunt right and was always helping my grandmother and I doing small household chores like changing light bulbs and that sort of thing. Despite the fact that he was a good man and I liked him, I was forced to kill him.
I say this now so coolly and I think that that must seem awfully evil to you, my reader, but I assure you that I did at one point atone for my crimes. My atonement was not absolving in the eyes of the law, but I didn’t need that, I had watched enough movies and TV to know how to kill someone and destroy all the evidence. I even managed to make it look like my uncle went insane and committed a murder-suicide. No, my atonement, my repentance was merely my attendance at their funeral.
I spoke a couple kind words and led a teary goodbye speech and made quite an actor of myself, for that’s what I always wanted to be, an actor. And when all was said and done I had just convinced everyone there that I was just an unlucky young boy who had felt death close to his heart on more than one occasion. Yes, I had felt death close to my heart many times, but no one thought, even for a moment, that I enjoyed that feeling.
This story is not your average read. It is meant to give you another perspective on death, the side of the killer. Most stories tell you of the victim, the victim’s family. They tell you the what, the where, and the how; yeah, well I’ll tell you the who and the why. First off, if you’ve ever lost a loved one you know what I mean, and you know how it feels. You cannot deny to yourself or to me that you have felt that rage that I felt. Most of you can say that you were just able to brush it off and go on with your normal life. Well, maybe I didn’t have a normal life to begin with. Maybe I was born to be a killer. I don’t know, but all I know is that I’m the best killer to ever live. That might be one of the most ironic statements ever said. But to this date I have not served a day for my crimes, well at least not willingly. You’ll see what I mean.
I guess first things first, parents dead, grandma dead, aunt/uncle dead. The latter is an interesting story because they were my first kills. I was just a virgin in the ways of death when I silenced the beatings of their hearts. My aunt, the true first, was easier than I had ever dreamed. I procured a bread knife from the kitchen and some fishing wire from our shed. I simply slashed at her neck with the knife and lined the fishing line up with the wound and pulled. It severed her fleshy neck almost to the bone. Now with blood spurting all over the kitchen, my uncle walked in.
“Hey hun, what’s for supper?” I remember him asking. I smiled evilly at him and forgot that I had ever loved him. I lunged at him with the knife. He parried my attack quite easily and stood to fight me. He was an ex-Marine sent home due to a pierced eardrum which in no way impaired his fighting skills. I had the bruises and cuts for weeks to prove that. I charged him again with the knife and he dodged me again, this time throwing me up against the refrigerator. The handle on the door caught me just right in the back and the bread knife was sent flying across the kitchen.
This was where fate smiled upon me, the knife flew not towards my uncle, but away so he could not retrieve it without going past me. I didn’t think that he was dumb enough to walk past my downed body to get the knife, I was wrong. Perhaps in his rage and grief at seeing his wife murdered by someone he trusted, all of his Marine training went out the window. He darted after the knife which had landed, ironically, just short of the sink in which the days dishes were soaking. He reached the knife and turned around.
He looked surprised that I was behind him. And in one fluid motion I took the rolling pin and clubbed him to death. The brain trauma caused by this would later be explained by my next action. I went to my uncle’s closet where I knew he kept his old sidearm. I tried to center it on the spot that I had beaten in so thoroughly, and pulled the trigger. CLICK. I should have known better, an ex-Marine who supported gun safety laws therefore kept his guns either unloaded or properly locked. I slid the little lock bar and tried again. This is where I realized I had goofed. My uncle moved and I shot him, not in the front of the head as planned, but in the top. He immediately collapsed dead and I got to work again.
Like I said before, I must have been born to kill because I never even thought about what I did I just worked on instinct. I wiped the gun down and placed it in my uncle’s right hand. I started off before I remembered that my uncle was left-handed. So I carefully replaced it in his left. Then came the problem of making it look like my uncle was the one responsible.
This turned out to be rather difficult, but it was an art and once mastered, is never forgotten. I moved to my ex-aunt’s side (ex meaning expired) and started to think. I found no easy way to make it look like my uncle had done this. So I decided to play a psychological card. Instead of making it look like my uncle had killed her, why don’t I just make him confess?
My skills in forgery being somewhat rudimentary I went to my uncle’s closet again where I pulled out one of his old war journals. It took nearly two hours before I finished the note. It was short and to the point. I can’t recall exactly what it said, but it was something like this:

Dearest Nephew,

What I have done is cowardly and wrong. I have awoken to the realization that my life was never to get better. I have found this fact to be unacceptable. As there was no other way out I have decided that it must end. I honestly wish you the best of life and hope that you do not meet the same fate someday.
Your repentant uncle

Something quite simple, to the point, and I had to make sure that it said nothing about him killing his own wife. I had hoped that investigators would look at it as cowardice, that he didn’t want to enter the next world alone. It was only later that I learned how truly a good job I had done. When I called the police an hour later they stayed on the phone with me until a unit got there.
When they arrived I pretended to know nothing about the note, which I had cleverly hidden in my aunt’s mouth. A little trick I learned from The Silence of the Lambs. They found it when the coroner arrived and began an autopsy right in the kitchen. The coroner, an old weathered man who was well-respected, read the note and handed it to the officers. The few of them that had eyed me suspiciously stopped and looked incredulously towards my dead aunt/uncle.
“Uh, sir, you’d better read this.” one of the policemen said to me as he handed me my cleverly crafted note. I read it and began to weep. It was not fake, but genuine. As the tears of joy at my clever distraction came slowly down my face it became apparent that they had bought it. I even fooled trained professionals, I thought proudly to myself. Now all that was left was the aftermath that always followed a death, a funeral.
I moved to have them cremated as they had both requested and the remaining family agreed. The service was a moving one, a powerful young minister led the family to tears, sorrow, and finally joyous remembrance of their lives. Pictures of the young couple in happy times were all over the place, though I was the only one besides the police with their most recent pictures.
So police convinced, coroner convinced, family convinced, thus is the tale of my first kill. This is one of the few that went down without a hitch. And indeed the one I am most confident with never getting pinned with.